The Folly of the "Eye Test"

and some people just don’t want to learn.

but I do wish that they would’ve slowed it down just a bit.

Scientific America, i believe is the magazine… they have some AMAZING stuff in there sometimes… They had a brain games feature that rocked my world. I do so love how our minds work.. with more time, I will try to find some. I’m at work right now… and I just muddled through this and the previous post… It has been like a train wreck… I just couldn’t stop looking…

but I’ve been doing a little of everything these days, apps included.

so why are numbers the only way to notice things that are actually noticeable to the eye?

It seems that people are just as likely to dismiss one poster for using “fancy math” to talk about a player as they are to jump on another poster for saying “forget the numbers, he doesn’t look like a good hitter.” Actually, it could just be this community, but the former seems to happen far more often than the latter.

There is a lot more “jumping on” that happens in one other circumstance, though, that I’m going to treat as different – and that’s when somebody uses a statistic incorrectly. Saying AVG is more important than OBP, for example, is one that comes up a lot. In those cases you’re just plain wrong, but because you’re using the math wrong; it’s not because of some inkling you’ve got about what you’ve seen.

All that said, “everything in moderation” is an important point, and is why I titled the last section of this post “Ne quid nimis.”

Not prediction model based on advanced stats is going to be fullproof. So no, advanced stats certainly can’t tell you everything. They can’t tell you about a break-out player who’s going to have a hot year, and they really can’t tell how good a rookie is going to be. You rely on scouting for that, and you just have a few basic indicators for success or failure of young players, but there’s not enough sophistication to tell you HOW good any of them will be.

That doesn’t mean you should argue with me if I tell you Alex Gonzalez is a bad hitter, and always will be. What advanced stats CAN do, and absolutely will do, is tell you what to think of a player who has over 6000 career plate appearances. He’s a bad hitter, not a very valuable player, and a cancer in a line-up. That’s not say nobody ever breaks out and becomes a great hitter at a late age-everyone will mention Jose Bautista. But that is one player in thousands, and if you bit on EVERY hitter that someone said had, “made an adjustment,” or “figured something,” you’d have a roster full of sucky hitters. The smart thing to do is to avoid adding sucky hitters to your team, even if they’ve just had a flukey good season.

Not sure why people think you have to use one or the other. You watch the player, use stats to confirm or deny what you see, then go back and look at the player armed with what you’ve learned. The two methods are meant to compliment each other, not clash.

wasn’t directed towards you. You don’t tend to have that air about you. And as you mention with that last graph, you have a healthy mix and respect for all factors, and certainly have a better understanding of advanced stats than I have.

Unofrtunately, others do, and say things like UZR says such and such, and since it’s perfect any argument other than regurgitating what UZR says is wrong. There are certainly some advanced scout advocates that do bring that level of arrogance to the table, just as there are some advanced stat detractors who bring a similar level of arrogance to the other side.

You make the error of assuming I exclude advanced stats from measurements and that is wrong, I merely trolled with a contrarian post to get the conversation started. I guess that two posts and over 200 comments in 24 hours proves there is an interest in discussing the topic on this board

Most people wouldn’t want to open themselves up for ridicule and not post this themselves, but I frankly find your reasoning humorous, no more so that the assertion that Frank Wren has a bad “eye”.

Let me know which team you are the GM and perhaps I’ll have respect for your opinion.

Man, now I feel bad.

/reassuring shoulder pat

There, there.

1) You personally value different aspects of defense than the advanced statistics. This is likely, and detracts from your ability to discuss which is a better defender, because it’s not quantified (so Prado turns routine plays better and KJ has better range – which one counts more? How much more?).

2) What you saw was misleading to you in some way. This is all but certain (that was the point of this post), only the extent to which it occurred is debatable.

I don’t think anybody’s really disputing that.

Statistics are also susceptible to being misleading, but it’s for more ‘mundane’ reasons that are easier to sort out – either we’re trying to use them incorrectly (using AVG to indicate offensive production as a whole), or we’re not looking at an appropriate sample (the infamous SSS), or the way the statistic is generated lends itself to being erroneous for a certain kind of player (the Hudson FIP example, or UZR for Catchers).

All of those are pretty easy to identify if you’re familiar with how the stats work. We’re notoriously bad at understanding how people work, though (we write songs about it and everything).

I’m sure it’s a misapplication of the concepts of modern physics that yields such a result, though, which is perfectly fine for this analogy.

is lack of knowledge. What goes in to it, and in what proportions, and why are the individual components weighted as they are? For a single stat, it’s probably better than most others. I’d still prefer to use several instead of just the one, like a triple slash + BB and K rate, to gauge the value of a hitter.

And it’s not intended to be a singular stat. The way I see wOBA, it’s like looking at run production (traditionally tracked as runs and RBIs) without having to worry about all the luck that goes into actually getting a run or an RBI.

like wOBA, and a singular stat, it’s better than SLG, OPS, etc singularly. But using it as an absolute measure will lead to mistakes same as using AVG alone (albeit fewer mistakes, but still mistakes and mistakes that could be further reduced by using it in conjuction with other #s).

You need to expound upon this point. I mean, it’s an absolute measure for what actually happened, the same as average is. There’s no mistakes inherent in the way it’s calculated or what it’s telling you. If you’re saying that looking at one player’s wOBA for one season leads you to problems, well, yeah. That’s definitely a problem. But that’s a misusing the thing. Just like not accounting for what position a guy plays and how good he plays defense is a problem. However, there’s nothing wrong with it, at all, as an offensive measure.

…just like every other stat.

For example, consider someone’s batting average is .270. Does that mean they have a 27% chance to get a hit? Not really, it just means that in the past they’ve gotten a hit 27% of the time, and we use that as an indication of their ability.

This is the same thing. Historically, a home run ends up netting you something like 1.60 runs on the average. Does that mean that a guy who hits 36 homers drives in 57.6 runs as a result? Probably not, but we can still use that average to help us evaluate his offensive potential.

the big thing wOBA does it combine OBP and SLG but it weights OBP more than SLG. thats the simplistic explanation. It is really a more advanced form of OPS.

It was irrelevant and unimportant.

anybody talking about baseball would be banned.

in something as broad as “mythology and world religions.”

“Hey guys, my dad let me help him grill, look at me!!”

Both of these can be seen as equally childish, when they’re begging for attention.

I guess everybody who’s going to read it has already been through it, though.

but that’s kind of the point. The trick isn’t about how you miss glaringly obvious stuff, it’s about how you miss stuff you’d otherwise notice if you weren’t focused on something else.

I won’t be.

You’re comparing a great modern building that was built with modern advances in architecture with a great ancient building that was build with then cutting edge advances in architecture.

But, as to this point:

"you know, this is a really tall building might be in the way of a stray aircraft… maybe we should plan for that just in case"

Gen 11:1-9, baby! God clearly hates tall buildings and will stop at nothing to tear ’dem bitches down

plane crashes aren’t things you plan contingencies for, they’re things that you hope don’t happen. Jet liners are basically gigantic missiles – high impact velocity + high mass + lots of highly explosive materials == an incredibly destructive force. There’s really not a lot we can do to prevent them from causing massive damage.

the Twin Towers WERE built to withstand plane crashes. It was where the planes hit that caused the collapse. When they were built, they were designed to absorb an impact and not topple over.

I don’t know if they simply over-looked the temperature at which steel weakens, or simply didn’t think that the steel would weaken to the point of collapse.